No playing around when these election results are announced

This won't be the first time you've heard this: We're on the verge of the most consequential election of our lifetimes.

When the results are officially announced Nov. 5, we'll finally have clarity. Will the voters get it right (Yahtzee, sidewalk chalk, bingo)? Or will they make a bad choice (Masters of the Universe toys, Risk)?

The consequences are enormous.

We're all wondering which three toys will be inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame this year in Rochester, N.Y.

Yes. The real election with results announced next week.

As you likely know, the 12 nominees for 2020 were announced earlier this year. Even during a pandemic, the Toy Hall of Fame goes forward, like a slinky (Class of 2000) bouncing down a long stairway or a Big Wheel (Class of 2009) going down a steep driveway. The nominees are the five aforementioned toys, as well as Baby Nancy, Breyer Horses, Jenga, Lite-Brite, My Little Pony, Sorry and Tamagotchi.

The Toy Hall of Fame began inducting toys in 1998. Most picks are great, but over the years, the hall has made the same obvious oversight, again and again: No version of the Nerf ball has been inducted, making it the Dan Marino, Barry Bonds or Susan Lucci of the toy world. Close, but never the chosen one.

Anyway, this year's ballot has some weaknesses in it, even if you ignore the Nerf snub. There are a couple of obvious slam-dunks (no offense to Nerf hoop), but even they aren't as strong as some earlier choices. For instance, the best group of the past decade is probably the Class of 2017, with the aforementioned Wiffle ball, Clue and the paper airplane.

All three of those rank higher than any of this year's nominees.

This year, sidewalk chalk is a strong favorite. While I don't think it existed when I was a kid (at least I didn't know about it. We just used regular chalk to play tic-tac-toe, design hopscotch boards and make lines to divide bike "lanes" on the road), but sidewalk chalk has been a part of childhood now for decades. Who doesn't like it?

The other favorite is likely bingo. While the Toy Hall of Fame website shows a specific board game of bingo, the nomination is for bingo in general. This is a rare multigenerational choice, as it's popular among kids (I remember playing it in school to learn letters and numbers, then playing it in middle school Spanish to learn numbers and letters: "Bay ocho. . . Bay ocho"). It remains a staple for seniors. Bingo seems an obvious choice.

The third slot is wide open. As mentioned, I'd go with Yahtzee, but I acknowledge that the game isn't as much fun as I remember. I could see Jenga being chosen, too. Sorry deserves consideration if for no other reason that the memorable TV commercials of the 1970s.

For now, hold your breath and wait for the election results, which will be announced a 7:30 a.m. Nov. 5. Let's hope the losers accept the decision with grace.

And let's hope Nerf gets nominated in 2021.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

After months of a pandemic, will we ever return to offices?

I've worked in offices since I was 21: In newsrooms. In one cubicle among hundreds of other cubicles. In a converted warehouse with four offices. In my own office among dozens of cubicles.

But always in offices.

For the past seven months, I've worked from home and like many Americans, I am not eager to return.

That was one takeaway from a survey taken in late summer. The Wells Fargo/Gallup survey showed that 42 percent of workers surveyed had a positive view of working remotely (from home), while only 14 percent didn't like it. A similar survey in June showed that about one-third of workers would prefer to never return to their office, while more than 70 percent said they'd like to work from home at least twice a week.

One thing the pandemic taught office workers: Working from home is pretty good.

A caveat: Many people don't work in offices. Many people work in retail or food service or some other area and they either were deemed "essential  workers" and had to show up despite the pandemic and/or lost their jobs. Not everybody has an office gig and if you don't, this is probably irritating.

Sorry.

But I suspect many people had a similar experience to mine. Once the quarantine started, the first few weeks were weird. We were home, remotely logging onto an office server. Our work laptops were on the kitchen table or in a rarely-used office or in the middle of a chaotic bustle of kids and activity.

It didn't seem normal. Work was harder because there were more distractions. We were anxious about COVID-19. We wanted normal.

I remember asking co-workers when they thought we'd return to the office. I said May 1. Others said April. Someone said June. Someone said August and I laughed at her.

As time passed, working from home became normal. Mornings were less busy, with no commute. Business casual took on a new meaning (T-shirts and shorts every day). Zoom calls, Skype calls, IMs and emails took the place of breakroom conversations and staff meetings.

At our home, Mrs. Brad – who probably wondered if she could survive spending all day at home with an twitchy, active extrovert – got into her own pattern of work (away from me). We adjusted.

It's been seven months. It seems normal.

The COVID-19 pandemic has permanently changed life. Going forward, we'll no longer find it unusual if someone wears a mask in public. We will take it seriously when a new threat is announced. We'll use technology to meet with other people.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference will be how we office workers work. After years of startups and high-tech companies giving employees the opportunity to work from home a day or two a week, we've discovered that most of us can be just as productive at home as at the office.

Working from home makes sense.

In 2021, it will be harder for our bosses to insist we need to be in the office to be productive. In fact, they may realize it's a good deal to let people work from  home and have smaller in-person offices.

The American workplace may be in the middle of a revolutionary change. All it took was a global pandemic, the advancement of technology and a few months to get used to it.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

In an unprecedented time, there is still a 'silent' majority

 

Americans are angrier than they've been in a generation. Maybe angrier than ever. A lot of people are spewing bile.

Most aren't.

Don't get confused by social media and the outrage du jour. The majority may be angry, but it's still largely silent. Or at least reasonably polite.

Everybody isn't screaming.

Richard Nixon used the term "the silent majority" in 1969 to describe what he considered the majority of Americans – a mass of folks who supported the Vietnam War, but didn't take to the streets as antiwar protestors did.

Nixon may have been wrong – he sure was within a few years, when most Americans opposed the war – but the phrase stuck. Variations of it have been used many times, with varying degrees of accuracy.

However, when I say "the silent majority," I don't mean one side of the political debate. I mean the people screeching on social media aren't the majority.

They're the loud minority.

Think about that the next time you get irritated about people being mean or hostile or dishonest.

They may be right. They may be wrong. They're not the majority. Everybody isn't ranting.

Back when I was an editor at the Daily Republic, one of my duties was to monitor the online comments on the newspaper website.

People could post anonymously. There were key words that would automatically send a post to moderation, but people found ways around it: Using symbols instead of letters. Making slight misspellings. Making racist comments that didn't include a forbidden word.

I had to review comments a couple of times a day. I had to reject some comments that snuck through. I had to approve some comments that had been incorrectly flagged. I had to read all the awful comments.

I once heard a radio talk show host say he loved the listeners, hated the callers. I had a variation: I loved the readers, but disliked most commenters.

That's where we are now in political discourse. It seems like everyone is hostile and angry and mean.

However . . .

Remember that you only see on social media what is posted. You don't see what isn't posted.

You don't see the silent majority.

Seeing 10 tweets or 10 Facebook posts that are outrageous doesn't mean that everyone is outrageous. It means that those 10 people are outrageous. They want you to hear their opinion. They are angry and want blood.

The majority of us may be angry. We may be passionate. We may be convinced we're right and the other side is wrong.

But most of us aren't screaming it from the rooftops, posting it on Facebook, tweeting it or even commenting on it on newspaper websites. Most of us aren't insulting those who disagree with us.

Social media makes us seem meaner, although it really just amplifies what was already there. The past four years has seen an unprecedented level of vitriol in politics. You can decide who's to blame (I know who I blame), but don't make the mistake that everyone is mean and everyone is hostile because "everyone" on social media seems that way.

The silent majority may be angry and may have strong opinions. But they don't post them all the time and bore us.

Most of us are still civil.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.

Parasites are our friends, so we need to help save them

Save the tapeworm!

Because the only thing better than a site is a parasite(s).

Get it? That's one of the ideas in my latest marketing plan: Improving the image of the lowly parasite with clever marketing.

Yes, parasites: Tapeworms. Hookworms. Bed bugs. Tsetse flies. Lice.

Maybe a T-shirt that says, "Have a lice day!" Or a remake of the cheesy 1960s song, "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," but as "Itsy Bitsy Tsetse Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini."

You know, something the kids will like. Because we need to help parasites. We need to raise their Q score. A movie called "Parasite" winning the Academy Award for best picture in 2019 was the first step, but we need more.

"Parasites have a major public relations problem," says Chelsea Wood, assistant professor at the University of Washington's School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences in an article on NPR's website.

Here's why: Parasites make up about 40 percent of animal species in the world., but as much as 10 percent of parasites might go extinct in the next 50 years, due to loss of habitat.

Yet nobody cares.

Save the whale? How about save the lice? Or the Nematomorpha, also known as a hairworm. A hairworm is the parasite that controls the brain of a cricket.

"When they're in the cricket, they manipulate the cricket's behavior, making the cricket jump into water, basically committing cricket suicide," Skylar Hopkins, assistant professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University, told a reporter for NPR. The article continues to inform us that "once in the water, the shockingly long hairworm bursts out of the cricket to complete its life cycle."

Kind of magical, right? If you can get past the idea of something called the hairworm, it being "shockingly long" and that it controlled a cricket's mind.

The thing about parasites is that we don't even know most of them. The NPR article said that scientists have identified only about 10 percent of parasites in the world, which allows 90 percent of the parasitic world to avoid paying taxes and to "live off the grid," presumably.

Save the parasite.

Wouldn't it be sad to lose a huge percentage of living animals without even knowing them?

I mean take the scabies. Or the lung fluke. For every species of them, there could be nine other species that we haven't identified. And one-tenth of them could go extinct by 2070.

A team of scientists have created a global parasite conservation plan, which is akin to the efforts to preserve the bald eagle and save the whale. Except it's for worms and other parasites. (By the way, they don't include parasites who harm humans, so put away the torches and pitchforks.)

Parasites are often seen as living off others, but we overlook the fact that they contribute to circle of life. Without parasites, there would be much less biodiversity. And fewer nightmares about tapeworms.

And how would a world without parasites look?

"Conservation often talks about this metaphor: If you pull the nails out of the side of an airplane one by one, how many can you take out before the plane can't fly?"  Colin Carlson, assistant professor and biologist at Georgetown University, told NPR. "And we're looking at that with parasites now. If we see the total collapse of parasitic ecosystems, we have no idea what that's going to do."

But we know it will change things. We need to save the parasite.

If you agree, consider posting the link to this column to your favorite website. Or, to be more effective post it to a parasites.

See? Parasites are fun! Let's save them.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.